“Reckless Inaccuracies Abounding”: André Malraux and the Birth of a Myth
2009; Oxford University Press; Volume: 67; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/j.1540-6245.2009.01344.x
ISSN1540-6245
Autores Tópico(s)French Literature and Poetry
Resumofield of theory in English-speaking countries in the 1960s and 1970s, the decades immediately following the publication of the English translations of two of his major works in the field, Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence) and La Metamorphose des dieux (The Metamorphosis of the Gods). One academic commentator at the time wrote of the extravagant praise from some quarters for Malraux's art philosophy and its wide while another, reviewing these two works in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, described Malraux as an art critic whose influence and renown in recent years is perhaps matched only by that of Sir Herbert Read.1 Since that time, however, Malraux's fortunes in Englishspeaking countries have shown a marked decline. While he remains a relatively familiar name as a novelist and as an innovative Minister for Cultural Affairs under de Gaulle, his books on the theory of have receded into a penumbra where they remain largely the preserve of a small number of Malraux specialists, principally, though not exclusively, in France. Today, despite the initial surge of popularity, Malraux is a name seldom mentioned in the deliberations of aestheticians and philosophers of art, especially in English-speaking countries, and his books on the theory of are often left unread.2 There are a number of possible reasons for this. One is that Malraux's writings do not fit readily into either of the prevailing schools of thought in contemporary aesthetics. He is neither analytic nor Continental, nor even some subtle blend of the two. The current tendency of theoretical discourse to cluster around these two orientations has not therefore worked in his favor. Another rea-
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